Keep the Change

For the record, I spent Election Day 2008 driving people to the polls. I didn’t ask any of them what their political preferences were, although many volunteered that information, and I wouldn’t have denied a ride to anyone based upon such a consideration, but since most of the people were elderly, female and of African descent, I can pretty much surmise what they did in the voting booth, and, more importantly, why they did it. I also contributed money I couldn’t afford to the Obama campaign for President and spend a chilly few months in the old household while my wife supported Hillary in the primaries. Now, just slightly less than one year into the Obama presidency, I’m starting to get that sinking feeling that you get when you begin to suspect the Van Gogh etching you greedily bought without proper caution is a fake. Of course, like any case of desperation related denial, I will keep the etching proudly displayed upon the wall and pray that I am wrong.

I do realize that President Obama took office under a set of circumstances which were as unfavorable as any since at least Franklin Roosevelt and I know it is hard to remodel the kitchen when the house is on fire, but the continued failure of the America economy is not what troubles me. I am of the opinion that our current economic struggles are the result of decades of short-sighted consumer behavior, regulatory failures and the policies of both Democratic and Republican administrations which favored the accumulation of shareholder value over fundamental economic development. These things will not be corrected by President Obama nor all the king’s horses and all the king’s men any time soon. The things that bother me are far simpler, and as a result, far more disturbing.

I’m going to give the President a pass on Iraq, although I’m not fully convinced that he deserves it, but it is clearly a complex situation and it appears that things are slowly sorting themselves out, although we are still pouring an incredible amount of money and intermittently the lives of our soldiers into fixing a mess that should be the responsibility of the Iraqi people themselves. The trouble with Iraq is that it is the poster child for the Bush Doctrine, which basically says we can, and perhaps should, impose our “superior” values on the rest of the world by force, although one of our values is that values should never be imposed on others by force. President Obama probably rightly fears the instability that would result from a too hasty U.S. exit, but there comes a time when the chicks must leave the nest on principle alone. We don’t want Iraq living in our basement and bringing its unemployed friends over for the next hundred years.

So forget Iraq, but the last time I checked, President Obama was still the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces. So why do we still have this stupid “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy? I know there are a lot of people in this country who feel homosexuality is a sin or a perversion or something equally unpleasant, but unless I completely misunderstood, their candidates lost the election. We bed-wetting Liberals put Obama in office and we want gays to be able to openly bleed and die for their country just like every other poor son-of-a-bitch of whatever persuasion in the military. To deny someone the right to serve their country because Sarah Palin doesn’t like their sex habits is the height of foolishness, not to mention being down right unpatriotic. And why is Guantanamo Bay still an operating prison? Why has the policy of rendition not been clearly and specifically denounced and terminated? What stuns me is that President Obama won’t do these simple things to demonstrate that he understands why he is the President, which he apparently doesn’t. I could go on and on about the triumph of form over substance in health-care legislation, the escalating American presence in Afghanistan and the consistent kissing of Wall Street’s ass, but those are also complex issues which merit substantially more effort than I am willing to make between Christmas and New Years; nonetheless, I am sadly coming to the conclusion that President Obama is similar to virtually all of his predecessors in the fact that executive policy is driven by perceived political necessity rather than commitment to principle. What is even sadder is that as he compromises on everything important to me, the Right in America intensifies its hysterical efforts to discredit him. Perhaps the sharks of pessimism already smell the blood of a seriously wounded dream.

The Sixth-Century B.C. Greek philosopher Heraclitus is quoted as observing that one “cannot step twice into the same river”, illustrating his defining principle of the inevitability and inexorability of change. He felt that there was an underlying universal force governing change, but he never fully defined the supposed nature of that force. Heraclitus was something of a buzz kill, eventually parting ways with his fellow Ephesians over their alleged self-indulgence and he spent the last years of his life wandering the mountains, eating grass and talking trash about Homer and Pythagoras. He was later much admired by the Stoics, whose motto was basically “get used to it”, but I have to wonder if Heraclitus, like an increasing number of us, became disillusioned by the contradiction of the clear and absolute certainty of change and the preponderant likelihood that said change would not be the same change we had chosen to believe in.

Roid Rage

99942 Apophis is a an irregularly shaped, 1000 foot wide chunk of rock (or perhaps metal) that is meandering around the solar system periodically coming uncomfortably close to the earth’s orbital path. This particular piece of rock was discovered by three dudes in June of 2004 and immediately became a matter of some concern to people that concern themselves with being concerned about such things. Apophis, by the way, is the Greek name for the Egyptian demon Apep, the ‘enemy of Ra” and the personification of all that is evil. That’s a pretty harsh moniker for a chunk of rock, but as we shall see, it is not completely without merit.

Apophis has a mass of approximately 2.7 × 1010 kilograms, or 29,762,405 tons. Unbelievably, that’s more massive than Mariah Carey’s ass. It orbits the sun once every 323 days and scoots along at about 30 kilometers per second, or right at 67,000 miles per hour. It has an elliptical orbit (of course) which takes it as far as about 103 million miles from the sun and as close as 69 million miles; and this just happens to be in the ball park of the 93 million mile average distance of the Earth from the sun. While Apophis is by no means the largest lump of debris pursuing its own independent course through the solar system, it is so far projected to be one of those that comes the closest to our little green planet, potentially intersecting Earth’s orbit several times during the current century. Present analysis indicates that Apophis will make a very near miss in 2029 with the potential for a further close encounter in 2036 and again in 2037. Because interaction with the gravitational fields of countless other bodies occurs continually during orbit, it is difficult to predict the exact location and velocity of any celestial object too far in the future, or the probability of collision, hence the uncertainty, and anxiety, about Apophis.

Most everyone with reasonably decent eye-sight has seen a “shooting-star” at some point in their lives. These meteors are typically no larger than your fist and are totally consumed by the heat and pressure of entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Larger meteoroids will sometimes survive all the way to impact, becoming meteorites, often after doing great violence to the Earth’s surface. The Earth has been bombarded by these cosmic leftovers every hour of every day since God said let there be light. Unknown to most, shortly after the light thing, God also said let there be crap slamming into other crap on a random basis forever and ever, amen; so, our beautiful little Eden here has been on constant alert for divine kinetic intervention for about four and one-half billion years. In that time we have apparently been walloped by some real doozies, and all we need do is take a gander at our sterile neighbor, the Moon, to see what can happen, given enough time.

Apophis is potentially a treacherous little demon, but nothing like the devil himself that slammed into the Earth around 65 million years ago. That asteroid, or comet, may have been as large as 6 kilometers in diameter and could have released an explosive force equal to as much as 100 million megatons of TNT, ruining an otherwise pleasant day for much of the world’s existing life. There is still some debate as to whether this event caused, contributed to, or had nothing to do with, the extinction of the dinosaurs, but if it happened the way most geologists think it did, it would, without doubt, have been a catastrophe of enormous proportions. Apophis’ relatively paltry 350 meter diameter and estimated 880 megaton explosive force may pale in comparison, but it is still estimated that if it hit one of the more populous areas along its potential path, it could result in tens of millions of deaths and have significant long-term effects on the global climate. The unfortunate part is that Apophis, and countless other bodies like it, will inevitably smack into the Earth at some point in the future if the Earth is around long enough.

Based upon current observations and calculations, NASA believes there is a one in 250,000 chance that Apophis will collide with Earth in April of 2036. That sounds like a real long-shot, but consider this; the odds of winning the Powerball multi-state lottery are one in approximately 159 million and there is a winner or two every two to three weeks. While this is not a valid statistical comparison, it is meant to point out that even very unlikely events do occur, and if such an occurrence would result in very unsatisfactory results, it might be a good idea to contemplate the situation. A Near Earth Object (NEO) is defined as any object whose orbit brings it into close proximity with the Earth, close being defined as orbiting within approximately 121 million miles of the sun. There are a few thousand NEOs already identified and each of these has some calculable probability of striking the Earth at some point. Many NEOs are quite large and there are potentially many, many times more NEOs still unidentified; then there are all the random, rouge asteroids, comets, planetoids, Plymouth satellites and broken down alien spaceships which may fly out of nowhere and smash into us with little warning.

So here’s the deal. I am an unrepentant space exploration enthusiast and feel we would be way better off if we took all our military budgets and used them to research warp drive or turn Mars into a habitable planet. I believe in a human future that is unconstrained by gravity, but for those of you who don’t feel the same way, I would break it down like this; to the large number of gentle fellow humans who believe God will protect you and your progeny until the end times, go back to sleep; I’m not talking to you. To those of you who think the moon landings were faked by the government in order to steal your hard-earned cash through outrageous taxes; go Google “booger” or “sex with chickens”; you’re wasting your time here. However, for those of you who value human civilization and understand the power of the human mind, give Apophis some thought; and especially for those of you who believe in the value of the human spirit and the natural world we inhabit, but who are suspicious of the military/industrial complex and want our resources to be committed to relieving human suffering and promoting a sustainable civilization, think about the “enemy of Ra” and what will be necessary to combat him if he turns his eye to us.

Photographing Fairies

I recently had a run-in of sorts with the fine people over at Huffington Post over some comments I tried to post relating to an article they published by one Mr. Dana Ullman concerning what he termed "nanopharmacology". Nanopharmacology is apparently a term which relates to regular pharmacology at the level of nanometers (which is scientifically problematic in and of itself) which purports to be the explanation of why the scientific method generally cannot find any indication of validity to homeopathic medicine. I could write 726 pages of my opinions on why homeopathy is a fraud and at least 16 pages would have some element of fact to them, but it is not my intention to again debate homeopathy per se. Rather, I wish to address the issues of why democracy is a failure, human civilization is doomed and Fox News stays on the air.

First, let me say I am a regular reader of the Huffington Post and I generally appreciate its Liberal bias because it serves to re-enforce conclusions I have already reached even before reading anything. I have known for many years now that Arianna Huffington is something of a flake, like many unrepentant hippies, but I credit her instinct towards humane ideas as well as finding her dreamily hot in a "crap, I am already almost 50 myself" sort of way. So I am not completely surprised that elements of the website tend towards New Age themes and alternative medicine. After all, nobody is perfect. Anyway, I thought this article by Mr. Ullman was particularly egregious in its effort to unscientifically co-op certain concepts that are insurmountably obtuse to most people, such as quantum mechanics and nanotechnology, and use them to vaguely explain away the statistical failure of homeopathy to ever produce anything but anecdotal results. In this context, I wrote a comment on the article which the web administration type dudes declined to publish.

The reason they gave when they kindly responded to the email I wrote protesting this Stalinesque censorship was that my comments violated their rules of polite discourse. They citied my use of terms such as "irrational pseudo-scientific crap" and "malicious fraud" as being inconsistent with the carefully reasoned, fact based commentary that they desired to promote. Fair enough, but I would point out, as I reminded them, that free speech and the democratic process are often less than polite and the social obligation to respect extends only to respect of the right of the individual to hold and express an opinion, not to respect of that opinion itself. The Huffington folks are certainly under no obligation to provide a forum for my views and I concede their right to censor their own content, if not the wisdom of it, but that isn't even what I am really ranting about.

What got me thinking about the decline of the West is this tendency towards binary reasoning that afflicts much of what we think and believe. We often see truth as a straight line that runs from right to wrong, and we set up these bogus dichotomies in our minds such that if "A" is true "B" must be false, when "A" and "B" often have nothing to do with one another. What the hell am I talking about, you ask? My point is that just because the Pharmaceutical Industry may be a soulless enterprise that experiments on man and beast alike and actively seeks to obscenely maximize profit, even at the expense of limiting access to useful new medicines, that doesn't mean homeopathy is anything but a ridiculous load of manure. In my fevered imagination I have ferreted out this logical fallacy that I believe is challenging our ability to progress intellectually and the folks at Huffington post are a prime example.

Needless to say, any thoughtful and caring person will look at our civilization and find much to be desired. I have already postulated frequently that it is human flaws and not autonomously misanthropic institutions which create this reality, but whatever brought us here, a lot of people seek alternative paradigms for managing all aspects of human affairs. Alternate methods of governance have been experimented with throughout the centuries and we have settled on the models that seem to work least poorly, but political truth is not the same as medicine, engineering or other scientifically based endeavors. Whether wealth should be redistributed or health care should be universal are not really issues which can be resolved through observation and experimentation. Science cannot tell us which wars are moral, but it can tell us whether a homeopathically diluted solution of ground nightshade has any effect on nausea, which, by the way, repeated controlled experimentation suggests is not the case. I am concerned that the emerging lack of trust in common sense resulting from rejection of what some see as the sterile, industrial, capitalistic misappropriation of scientific process will just result in further enslavement of the poor and ignorant as they sink into the delusional morass of qi.

Ancient cultures were excellent scientists. They observed and repeated and verified. If by chance they happened to grab a certain leaf in a pinch to apply to a wound as a bandage, and that wound seemed to heal more quickly and completely, they would use that leaf again the next time someone was injured. If the results were repeatable, the medicinal properties of the leaf became an established fact of that culture. This was not some mystical revelation, but good old fashioned scientific method. It did not matter to what the culture ascribed the results; the plant's life force, wood sprites or some god's intervention; they harnessed reason and logic to anticipate the effects of the plant's usage. These were not kinder and gentler cultures; they were just people like us using every physical and intellectual resource at their disposal to survive in an indifferent world. And there is nothing kind and gentle about cancer or diabetes or the Ebola virus; they are vicious, implacable enemies, who must be bludgeoned into submission through force of knowledge, whether that knowledge involves lifestyle, medication or medical procedure. The supposedly primitive cultures that have preceded us would laugh at our growing reliance upon unproven and unverifiable cures in the same way we arrogantly smirk at their myriad ignorant beliefs.

So the Huffington Post can exclude me from the conversation because my tone is not civil if they like; it is, after all, a free country, but I am not going to pretend the Emperor has new clothes just because it brings psychological comfort to some of the desperate and disappointed people who reject the callous inequity, exploitation, destruction and inhumanity of a technological civilization that can and should do better. Retreating from the scientific foundation of human welfare because of the use of good ideas to do bad things is like rejecting your wife because she got raped; you only succeed in blaming the victim and destroying the very thing you sought to preserve. While it certainly could turn out that I, and the world's scientific establishment, are completely wrong and homeopathy is the greatest medical leap forward of modern human civilization, the probability of that is minute; however, the probability that the blind will lead the blind is great, and the probability that exploitive self-interest will masquerade as enlightenment to deprive the foolish and desperate of their lucre is enormous. In that respect, some things never change.

It Takes Big Balls

And behold! The lowly dung beetle. These some 5,000 species are members of the ironically classified superfamily Scarabaeoidea, and are united in their singular love of poo. While insects are noted particularly for their indefatigable pragmatism in feasting upon every putrid, corrupt, desiccated and decaying scrap of the misfortune of life on Earth, the dung beetle makes a virtue of the ultimate necessity. Using feces as a source of nutrition, a nursery or even as an entire residence, this is one insect that clearly knows its shit. Dung beetles are found all over the world in a variety of habitats and are native to every continent with the exception of Antarctica, where one might speculate there is some pretty c-cold caca. The beetle’s signature move is forming a portion of a dung pile into a nice round ball and rolling it in a seemingly straight line until it arrives at wherever it is that a beetle would take such a thing.

Dung beetles are notorious thieves and lazy interlopers will often lurk around the perimeter of the dung source and attempt to liberate the work products of their more industrious neighbors. Mating pairs will often collaborate on removing the dung ball, although entomologists observe that the female more often simply follows behind the male rather than actually assisting in moving the dung, perhaps taking the opportunity to convey to the male advice on how to perfect the effort. Generally no more than one to two inches in length, dung beetles are prodigiously strong, moving up to 50 times their own weight. The ball itself is ultimately buried to serve as a refuge and food source for the developing larvae or as a food cache for the adult beetles. There is a single species of dung beetle residing in South America that is not a fan of dung, preying principally on millipedes. One cannot help but wonder if they simply tired of having to eat shit all the time.

Al Gore would be proud of the environmental consciousness of the hardy dung beetle. With their specially designed digging legs, the beetles remove, distribute and bury enormous volumes of dung, playing a key roll in renourishing the soil, and their efforts prevent the accumulation of large amounts of dung which might serve as a breeding ground for pests like biting flies. Because modern ranching methods concentrate animals in restricted ranges, the beetles aid ranchers in the Herculean task of removing manure, so much so that it is estimated they save livestock producers hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and all they ask in return is a tasty little turd of their own. Actually, it is somewhat inaccurate to say that the dung beetles eat dung; they really just suck on it. Because the moisture in the dung is rich in nutrients and tasty micro-organisms, the beetles suck the juice out, leaving behind fiber and other vegetative matter. The dung is such a complete snack that the adult beetles eat and drink nothing else. The growing larvae consume the solid elements of the dung ball, which are usually more than adequate for their needs, leaving behind precious dung to enrich the soil and provide a medium for the growth of numerous micro-organisms.

The love life of the dung beetle is about as shitty as that of most humans. The male grows a large horn which he uses to threaten and combat other males for the right to mate with a female whom he has attracted with his large ball of dung. They run off together and mate in, and around, the dung ball, which then becomes home to their hungry offspring. The kids eat up all their shit and then leave, without so much as a thank you. Since dung beetles typically live anywhere from three to five years, they may repeat this humiliating process several times in their lives. Once the dung ball is used up, the female leaves and looks for another sucker. Go figure.

The scarab beetle that was once so revered by the ancient Egyptians is a prominent member of the dung beetle family. What the Egyptians found so note-worthy about the beetle is difficult to say, although it was associated with Khepri, the god of the rising sun. The image of the scarab beetle was related to the concepts of death and rebirth and renewal and transformation and was a key element of funerary symbology. Many pharaohs were buried with a dung beetle carved from precious stones placed upon their chests near where their hearts had recently been. Dung beetles even rushed out of the subterranean crypts to attack Brendan Fraser and Rachael Wiesz in 1999’s The Mummy. That was, however, given the harmless nature of the dung beetle, just a bunch of shit.

The dung beetle is pretty much a blue collar sort of a guy. It does the dirty work that needs to be done and never complains. It accepts its place in the scheme of things and makes the best of its situation, but there is more to the story than the pedestrian pathos of a life filled with shit; despite its uncomplicated nature, the dung beetle is not so different from us. It rolls its ball of dung like a miniature Sisyphus with the dedication of an obsessive-compulsive IRS agent. It places love and family above comfort and convenience and isn’t afraid to fight when its rights are challenged. It knows the value of having lots of shit and may even take somebody else’s shit if the opportunity arises. But more than anything, the dung beetle seeks to craft order from the chaos of life; it seeks to take the shit cast off after the process of life itself has sucked all value from it, and, stubbornly disputing the inexorable finality of entropy, it defiantly builds an empire of dung. Rock on brother from another mother. We feel your pain.

Who Knew?

I recently stumbled across one Dr. Robert Lanza who is the principle proponent of a metaphysical construct (I hesitate to use the term “theory”) known as “Biocentrism”. I jetted over to Wikipedia to read a brief outline of the concept and found what I would describe as something Timothy Leary and Neils Bohr might have dreamed up late one night over a cup of chamomile. As previously emphasized, I am just a humble wormhole repairman, which does not make me an expert on much of anything; after all, the guy who fixes your brakes is not necessarily a metallurgical engineer, but there was something oddly compelling about the shear cosmological arrogance of Dr. Lanza’s musings and something compellingly odd about the fact that there were actual qualified physicists who suggested they might have merit.

Biocentrism appears to be an elaboration upon the quantum observation problem, which is just a more formal articulation of the tree falling in the woods thing. Quantum mechanics is really complex and indecipherable, even for those who have made a profession of it, so it would be useless for me with my superficial understanding to attempt to provide clarity to the subject, but the question at issue is whether reality exists independent of an observer, or whether consciousness is a prerequisite for defining reality. Without even having to resort to Depak Chopra or Shirley McClain, there are perfectly reputable physicists who will tell you that probability wave functions really are collapsed by observation and that each resolution of a quantum state will create a whole new universe where the thing that happened here didn’t, or visa versa. This gives me great comfort since it means that somewhere in the paniverse one version of me is good-looking, rich and living in sin with Salma Hayek.

Dr. Lanza speculates that time and space are methods of perception, not external realities, eliminating distinctions between here and there, past, present and future, and alive and dead. He suggests not that consciousness is a property of the universe, but that the universe is a property of consciousness and therefore (to quote Wikipedia) “there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life”. So, if we, or some other conscious beings, were not present in the universe, there would be nothing but an indeterminate probability cloud bereft of history or meaning, sort of like Sarah Palin’s brain.

Anyway, let’s pretend for a minute that we actually understand what all this is supposed to mean and that there are no problems such as defining “consciousness” or establishing how consciousness could evolve in a universe where nothing definitive is happening. My question is; who gives a rat’s ass? Don’t get me wrong; I adore scientific speculation and have an irrational faith in technology’s unproven ability to redeem human failure, but ultimately I think we are going to have to come to terms with the fact that our presence in this universe and its associated burden of consciousness is the only “fact” that really matters. We spend an inordinate amount of time examining the how and why of things, and when that results in cool stuff like organ transplants and life-like sex robots, all the better, but when it results in people blowing up the other people who have arrived at a different answer to the questions of how and why, or when people are so consumed by the speculation that they ignore the wonder of daily existence, well, then its just plain foolish.

Albert Einstein said that “a perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem”. Albert was a very wise fellow, and the quote begs the question; when we figure this all out and have teased each and every secret from nature, will we be any closer to understanding anything than we are now? Dr. Lanza may be correct in at least one sense; whether his speculation reflects anything true about the physical realities of space and time, it is certainly true that we create our own realities through attitudes and actions and that the presence of each of us contributes to the reality of us all. Whether anything really means anything, much of it means something to me, and that is as real as it gets.

Mercury, Winged God of Fallibilism

In case anyone cares, I am now boycotting Jim Carey movies. He is on my list with Tom Cruise, Oliver Stone, Shirley McClain and a host of others I have identified as promoters of junk science, conspiracy theories, channeling, colon detox and fad diets. Why Jim Carey you ask? Well, Mr. Carey and his intellectually accomplished wife, Jenny McCarthy, are at the forefront of promoting the scientifically unsupportable idea that certain childhood vaccines cause autism and the also scientifically unsupportable claim that autism can be successfully treated by removing accumulations of heavy metals, such as mercury, from the body. Ms. McCarthy, who initially came to the attention of the public by showing us her ample bosom in numerous Playboy editions, has a son (not with Jim Carey) who has been diagnosed with autism. In all fairness to Jim Carey, if I were sleeping with Jenny McCarthy on a regular basis and she said the Earth was flat, I would probably also go all over the country positively extolling the flatness of the Earth, but that still wouldn't make it true.

Without digressing into a Doctoral dissertation on the efficacy of thimerosal (a mercury based preservative in some vaccines) and the evolution of the diagnosis of autism (which is also pretty eye-opening), suffice it to say that these are complex subjects which have been given great attention by government, industry, academia and regular people affected by the issues. I will be the first to concede that "scientifically unsupportable" does not mean "wrong"; it simply means that use of the scientific method does not support a causal link between, in this instance, mercury and autism. Science does not know what causes autism, but with the current knowledge base it would be just as valid to propose that milk, strained carrots or sex during pregnancy (or some combination thereof?) causes autism. Since the standard definition of autism represents a range of neurological and behavioral conditions, it is possible that these various elements have separate causation and that a complex web of environmental and genetic factors are in play, as with many other human afflictions. I would simply point out that it is unlikely those most burdened with the financial, emotional and physical costs of dealing with autism would be the ones to most objectively adjudicate these complex questions. Anecdotal evidence and the flawed science of those seeking to exploit the hope, fear, frustration, anger and desperation of the parents of children affected by autism cannot be substituted for reason, logic and mathematics.

But let me follow another train of thought in addressing why Mr. Carey will no longer receive my financial support for his artistic endeavors (even though I have thoroughly enjoyed many of his movies and almost all appearances on In Living Color). One of the things that troubles me the most about Mr. Carey's crusade is that he actively advises parents not to have certain vaccinations for their children, apparently due to what he perceives as the possibility of the child being harmed by the vaccine. While I believe his concerns are not well founded and are clearly not supported by a substantial majority of the scientific community, I am willing to accept that he is earnestly trying to protect the interests of other families and spare them the heartbreak that he and Ms. McCarthy have suffered with their son Evan, but good intentions, in, and of, themselves, accomplish nothing. Having said that, what if Mr. Carey were right and there was a real, statistically verifiable risk of developing autism associated with certain childhood vaccinations? Would that justify a campaign to discourage getting the MMR or other vaccines?

Easily available information (because if I have it, it must be easily available) indicates that in the last 150 years an estimated 200 million people world-wide have died from complications related to the measles. The death rate from measles in developed nations is well less than one-half of one percent of all cases, but in poorer parts of the world as many of one-quarter of those infected can die. Mumps is rarely fatal, but can infrequently cause sterility and other serious complications. Rubella is generally a mild disease but can cause miscarriages and severe and life-threatening birth defects. So how many cases of autism each year would be worth eliminating these diseases? It is currently estimated that approximately 1.5 of every 1,000 persons born annually will develop autism, and approximately six per thousand will develop some related condition of varying severity. Even those who believe thimerosal may cause autism can't estimate the percentage of cases that could be the result of other causation, so it would be some unspecified number of autism cases theoretically resulting from the use of thimerosal as a preservative in some vaccines, but other cases of autism are clearly not the result of thimerosal poisoning since children who are not vaccinated also are sometimes diagnosed as autistic. The point is, in allowing for Mr. Carey's logic, there is no way to conduct a cost/benefit analysis on the use of the MMR vaccine with a thimerosal preservative since there is not even theoretically the necessary empirical data to compare disease prevented with diseased caused.

While such a comparison may seem callous and mercenary, it is in fact the same analysis we make, consciously or not, for virtually every action we take. We feed our children into the jaws of war fully understanding that some will not return, but trusting that there is some greater good that will justify the random sacrifice of the few. We each have an approximately one in 4,000 chance that an automobile accident will be the cause of our death, but we all continue to drive and ride virtually every single day of our lives. We accept these risks with the implicit determination that what we get in return is worth the risks we are taking. Preservatives, thimerosal and others, are used in virtually all vaccines in order to prevent the introduction of harmful microbes into the vaccine and to extend the shelf-life of the product. There are both safety and economic concerns associated with this practice, and the interplay between the two dictates the availability of the vaccine and, therefore, the number of children who are able to be protected. It appears to me that Mr. Carey and Ms. McCarthy are encouraging other parents to take the risk of exposing their children to harmful, or even fatal, childhood diseases simply because their son got the short end of the probability stick. I have not heard anything from Ms. McCarthy on the dangers of breast augmentation procedures, but, of course, that would not fit within her model of reality.

The biggest problem with the anti-vaccine crusade being waged by Mr. Carey and others is that it confuses people with speculation and allegation without informing them. Parents are afraid to give their children vaccines for polio and meningitis, things that can kill them, because of concerns about the MMR vaccine. Many vaccines have never contained thimerosal and should, therefore, not be on the list of suspected autism agents. The Centers for Disease Control have established requirements for the elimination of thimerosal as a vaccine preservative, not because there is science to support it, but because people like Mr. Carey, who have no scientific background, have created a public fear campaign which has become a public health issue in and of itself. Killed virus flu vaccines are one of the few remaining that still are primarily preserved with thimerosal, and flu and flu-related complications like pneumonia kill an approximate average of 40,000 people in the U.S. alone each year. At least some of these deaths are children. There are people who are not allowing their children to receive the flu vaccine because of the non-scientific suppositions of people like Mr. Carey and Ms. McCarthy.

One of humanity's greatest intellectual strengths, the ability to recognize patterns in seemingly random events, can also be a great weakness when nonexistent patterns are discerned, and acted upon. We can all empathize with Mr. Carey's desire to understand what has happened to his adoptive son and why. We can feel for Ms. McCarthy as she struggles to provide support to a child to whom normal rules of communication and conduct are alien. We can understand the general desire to have all the answers be simple and clear and to feel all we have to do is hit upon the right explanation for things and the boogie-man will go away. Unfortunately we also have to understand that people's judgment can be clouded by grief and fear and that some people will promote certain explanations for political or financial reasons unrelated to the true nature of the issue. Science is not politics; it is not about the popularity or psychological comfort of an idea; it is not about one person's personal experience or the shared pain of an unfortunate few. It is about meticulous and detailed analysis, review and repeatable and verifiable experimentation, and an honest ability to admit and correct error. Science is, of course, flawed, as is all human endeavor, but it is still only a vehicle that takes us where our human urges drive us, much like art and religion. The difference is that science is understood to be subject to change as new facts reveal themselves, whether it be concerning global warming or the health consequences of thimerosal. Right now, science says Jim Carey is wrong, and doing the wrong thing for the right reasons is still just plain, old wrong.

Truth or Consequences

Well, here’s something interesting and non-political to talk about; gossip! It is always important to engage in gossip before all the facts are known, because once we know what actually happened we become either historians or conspiracy theorists, instead of gossips. It is also important to be one of the first gossips to gossip in order to influence the direction of speculation within your circle of inquiring minds. This makes you appear well connected and wise, which is an important part of status in most tribes. Gossip is a critical element of human communication and social bonding since it requires no actual investment of effort in research or critical thinking and is almost as much fun as sex, even more so for people who don’t like sex.

So, without further ado, how about that Tiger Woods? Tiger Woods is great to gossip about because he is probably the single most famous person in the world. Even if you don’t play golf, drink Gatorade or reside in civilization, you know about Tiger and his unlikely story of achievement and the billion dollar industry he has become. Everybody loves Tiger, even if he is a foul-mouthed, egocentric elitist who spends way more time signing advertising contracts than he does signing autographs for his adoring fans. By virtue of being .7874 shots per round better than any other golfer in the world, perhaps in combination with his boyish charm and multi-racial, international origins, Tiger commands the respect and affection of literally billions of humans, who possibly see him as an avatar of their own potential for god-like fame and fortune.

Anyway, what we know is this; Tiger left (or returned to) his house in his Cadillac Escalade in the wee hours of the Friday morning after Thanksgiving and promptly ran into a fire hydrant and a tree. This is all anyone can currently say with assurance, but that is by itself pretty fertile ground for speculation. Where was such a celebrity going at 2:30 in the morning with no shoes? How did he run off the road before even leaving the neighborhood? Why does a guy worth a billion dollars drive an Escalade? These are all very tantalizing questions, but we are presented with even more fodder for speculation by what is alleged to have occurred. First we are led to believe his Swedish model wife saved him from impending doom by breaking the window out of the vehicle and somehow extricating him before he bled to death, or the car exploded or the cops showed up, or something. All of this heroism is, of course, fine, and has nothing to do with me, but those who respect and admire Mr. Woods or follow his exploits on the links might wonder if he will ever recover from this brush with death and if he can at some point in the distant future be expected to resume his pursuit of every standing record in golf history.

Fortunately, he was treated and released from the local emergency room with what were described as “minor injuries”, primarily facial lacerations, that is, scratches. Since Mr. Woods and his wife have declined to provide statements to the police the only information the curious public has to filter through are statements from Mr. Wood’s public relations team, a neighbor’s brief call to 911 and all the hearsay from TMZ.com., and the hearsay is quite interesting. If you are inclined to believe the more negative and vicious rumors, Tiger was chased from his home by his lovely wife after she scratched his face in a brief assault and then grabbed (what else?) a golf club and proceeded to pursue him down the driveway and out into the street amassing a Mickleson-esque stroke total before Tiger drove into a tree, something he often also does during the U.S. Open. At this point, Tiger apparently emerged from the vehicle dazed and confused, possibly medicated, and sat down on the curb. I can completely understand.

This little drama was supposedly precipitated by Mrs. Woods’ belief that Tiger was involved in an extra-marital dalliance with a rather attractive 34 year-old New York woman whose occupation is variously cited as Club VIP Manager, Night Club Hostess or 9/11 Widow, depending on the source. Tiger may have gotten her confused with the Club Pro, or not, but there is little doubt that she can properly grip a shaft, though it is possible she may have a tendency to hook. In all fairness, however, Ms. Uchitel has denied having any involvement with Mr. Woods whom she has “only met a couple of times”, probably having crossing paths at all the fan events Tiger is known to frequent. As far as I know, the sole source for this salacious info is the National Inquirer, which has been wrong in the past, especially about Bigfoot, so I’m not sure I would accept their representations as fact. Mrs. Woods may well have the straight-up 411 about the situation, but unless you were there, how do you really know?

Tiger does, of course, have a real problem that deserves our empathy. He is a 33 year-old guy with a cute smile and the best body a legion of personal trainers can create. He has a net worth that starts with a “B” and spends most of his time traveling the world without the company of his wife and children. I suspect he routinely encounters a stream of rather comely young women who make no secret of the fact that they would like to catch the eye of the Tiger. I am not endorsing anyone’s moral failures, but temptation is compounded by opportunity, which is why most intelligent, faithful men studiously avoid putting themselves in situations where weakness of character will translate into behavioral failure, something Tiger may have practical difficulty doing. I do not know Mr. Woods and he could well love his wife dearly and be a man of great resolve, but it is small wonder that Mrs. Woods might be inclined to believe the worst when presented with the unlikely coincidence of the club hostess and the golf champion staying in the same hotel in Melbourne, Australia. Most women would probably find it to merit at least a good wedge shot.

Now, some may ask why any of this personal stuff is any business of anyone except Tiger and his wife, but that ignores the truth of modern celebrity economics. While we are only legally entitled to whatever information the Public Records laws of the State of Florida provide for, there is a massive industry built around the Tiger Woods persona and each of us contribute to the financial wellbeing of his family each and every time we drink Gatorade, buy any Nike product or use a Gillette razor. Tiger’s utility in marketing these products is based upon our perception of him as someone we respect, admire or envy. We wouldn’t know what we thought about Tiger if we didn’t have some sort of information to consider. Perhaps we don’t have a right to knowledge of the most intimate details of his life, but Tiger and his reputation are just like any other product we are being sold; fairness requires that we at least have a list of the ingredients. This is the Faustian bargain that all celebrities make, knowingly or not, and I have no sympathy for those who would accept the obscene compensation generated by their celebrity status and simultaneously bemoan the loss of privacy and the public’s insatiable thirst for the trivia of their lives. Strippers get paid for getting naked; it’s the way the world works.

In the end, after all the knowing laughter subsides and the ignorant masses move on to some other adored victim, there are still perhaps at least a couple of real lessons to be drawn from this hilarious public relations disaster. One of these is that lying never works. Even if you technically get away with it in the short term, the threat of future discovery will always be hanging over you, and most people, especially wives, have a pretty good instinct for what is probably true. Lying is entirely too much work if done right; keeping the story straight in the face of emerging facts requires proactive effort and keen awareness of changing circumstances, traits many American significantly lack. The other issue is that, despite the prevalence of untruthfulness in our society, most people just don’t respect liars. People will generally forgive almost any flaw in their idols if it is owned up to and the consequences are accepted, but bullshit always stinks. When you make your living from public adoration, mea culpa is a far better response than fuck you.

Of perhaps the greatest comfort to most of us is the knowledge that a private jet and a 155 foot yacht cannot protect you from domestic discord or a seven-iron swung in anger. Everybody has to go home at some point, no matter how grand the home may be. There is, after all, some basic fairness in the world, despite the widening differences in class and the seemingly magical lives of the privileged few. If the very rich are truly happier than most of the rest of us, which is apparently questionable, it is surely only because they have more things to distract them from their unhappiness. Tiger can go climb the Matterhorn with all the Hooters calendar girls or buy a weekend trip to the International Space Station with ten of his best friends, but none of that will compensate for the enduring pain of a damaged relationship with the mother of his children. The fundamentals of life, love and death remain unchanged by income; no amount of cash can buy you into being something that you aren’t, and there are no diamonds big enough to fill the holes left by betrayal and the collapse of a dream.

Anatomy of a Murder

Once again, the people who claim to love America the most conspire to portray one of our greatest strengths as a weakness of spineless Liberals that will bring destruction raining down upon us. In this instance it is trial by jury that is under assault by the hyper-patriots, who apparently believe that any adherence to principle is a show of weakness that will be exploited by our implacable enemies. In this instance, the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four lesser known conspirators for their involvement in the murderous attack on the World Trade Center has become a point of contention with the Fox News crowd. Apparently Al Qaeda scum like the Sheikh don’t deserve fair trials, and the risks of letting these morally challenged mass murderers have their day in court outweigh the value of our nation’s hard won freedoms.

I will be the first to concede that the whole issue of where these douche-bags fall on the defendant spectrum is legally complex, but in my simple mind it boils down to a clear binary choice; either they are prisoners of war and are entitled to whatever legal protections that affords them, or they are just common criminals who happen to allegedly be the most despicable of mass murderers, but who are, nonetheless, entitled to the tender ministrations of the American justice system. There would not appear to be any third option, as favored by self-proclaimed true patriots, which is characterized by dragging the accused out in the alley and shooting them without benefit of legal process. I don’t think that anyone is suggesting that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and those other walking turds are candidates for Citizen of the Year, but our courts deal with thousands of miscreants each year who are every bit as wretched as the five accused, if just not as notorious.

One of the issues raised by those opposed to open trial for these gentlemen is the risk that they will make the process a platform for their political views, as if killing those who disagree with you can be characterized as a political view. My reaction to this is, so what? We are bombarded daily with inane political messages masquerading as news, fact or entertainment; the only difference would be that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s will be slightly more ridiculous and offensive than most. But guess what; nobody has to watch or listen if they aren’t so inclined. However, you can be sure every ignorant and vituperative statement will be endlessly repeated and analyzed by our stalwart news media, including Hannity, O’Reilly and Van Susteren. I have for some time been laboring under the impression that our nation has long since determined that the risk of dangerous ideas pales in comparison to the risk of allowing government to sensor what people can say, even accused criminals. I hope I am still correct.

As the voices of ignorance and intolerance become increasingly shrill, I have less and less enthusiasm for writing pages and pages of imagined refutation and find myself drawn more to whimsical musing upon odd sea creatures and introspective analysis of my own human failures. I even find myself watching Keith Olbermann less because I just can’t stand the air of indignation and hostility, even when I agree with the commentator. I am getting weary of the constant metaphysical war for America’s soul and I suspect that many Americans have beaten me to the punch by ceasing to pay any attention a long time ago. It is, nonetheless, critically important that we remain actively committed to the founding principles of this nation, even when it is inconvenient, painful or dangerous. If we compromise our principles for asses like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, then he wins and we all lose.

Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful

And speaking of disasters, my two favorite righteous women, Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean, have again erupted into the consciousness of the nation, courtesy of that faithful public watchdog, the national media. Like herpes, there seems to be no cure for this social disease and even the haven of NPR is not safe from its debilitating effects. Ms. Palin is on the verge of publishing a book, which, according to excerpts, basically blames John McCain and an envious press for all her woes. I have not, and will not, read this dreadful tome, ghost-written by Josef Goebbels apparently, being content to condemn Ms. Palin based upon rumor and personal ignorance of the facts, much as she herself typically handles important issues. Ms. Prejean is currently making the rounds of that bastion of intellectual substance, the talk-show circuit, attempting to explain the concurrence of her biblical beliefs with boob-jobs and masturbation videos, as if such edification was truly necessary. These lovely ladies are, alas, just two further examples of how things go wrong when intellect and ego are not properly correlated.

But, as Coach Lee Corso says, not so fast. As much immature pleasure as I get from deriding these hapless nitwits, I have to concede that a modicum of self-reflection makes me a bit uneasy with my own sarcastic delight. Truth is, I am not quite as happy when reviling the pompous ignorance of Rush Limbaugh or the hopeless obliviousness of John Boehner, but throw Michelle Bachman into the mix and I may burst my spleen laughing at her deranged rantings. The dependent variable here is, of course, gender, with perhaps a second and even more telling variable of relative attractiveness, and I have to ask myself some hard questions about what’s going on down there in the garbage dump at the bottom of my skull and whether I am being objective and equitable when hating on all these mentally defenseless microcephalics.
As a general rule, people are uncomfortable with differences; they are uncomfortable dealing with them and uncomfortable discussing them. Some people will even deny that differences exist, between races or genders or household cleansers, for example, because if you allow for the possibility of a difference, then you allow for the possibility of a comparison and inevitably someone will conclude that one thing is smarter, stronger, more durable, more stable, more exciting, more moral or more delicious than another. Being thoroughly committed to the concept of genetic determinism (perhaps, as I am sometimes accused, to the point of irrationality), I believe there are real, empirically demonstrable differences between men and women, both physiologically and behaviorally. No one would dispute that men are, on average, discernibly taller and heavier than women, but if you suggest that there are differences in the genders in the manner in which information is processed or in emotional predilections, you may be confronted with a howl of dismay. Unfortunately, the howl of dismay has over the years virtually become my mating call, so I am not particularly adverse to it; nonetheless, it is necessary for an objective person to filter through their own prejudices to arrive at a fair estimation of the value of someone else’s ideas.

My conclusion is that there is some common knowledge here masquerading as dirty little secrets. First, people like Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean probably really don’t get a fair shake when it comes to intellectual credibility simply because they are women. Americans, including most American women, don’t take women as seriously as men as political or social leaders because those are roles which are seen as requiring typically masculine virtues such as decisiveness, emotional detachment, intellectual objectivity and the ability to be a real bastard. When you think about the fact that hotbeds of Islamic paternalism like Pakistan and Bangladesh have elected female heads of government, but in 2008 in America more Democrats (including me) chose the black guy with little experience and no record to speak of over the Lady of Steel, something notable is occurring. Women won’t even consistently vote for women, which confuses me greatly, and industry, government, academics, athletics and the arts remain irrefutably to some extent male-dominated enterprises.

Second, if you are a physically attractive woman, you are going to get even less respect. This contention is a little more subjective, perhaps, and I don’t have any sociological research to reference, but I do have a theory, and an opinion; or maybe a theory about an opinion about a theory. The fact is (according to me) that there is a part of the male brain that continually evaluates all females encountered for their potential as a mate. This mental undressing, far from being some perverted deviance, is an effort of the brain to determine the extent to which genes are properly expressed as an index of their utility in creating healthy, survivable progeny, should the opportunity arise. I will not go so far as to say this is a completely conscious process in all men, or that women don’t have their own evaluation sub-routine, but there is virtually no man who hasn’t at some point had his head snatched around by that unseen force to rotate in the direction of a female entering his visual field. This is more often the case when the brain, through analysis of peripheral visual data, has already made an unconscious preliminary determination that there are potentially really good genes present. Despite the scorn heaped upon males by women for this failure, it is truly an autonomic nervous response which requires great discipline to control. The point is, if you are female and hot, most men are too busy watching your pretty lips moving and visualizing different types of underwear to pay any attention to what you are saying. This problem is compounded by the tendency of many attractive women to exploit this erotic hypnosis when dealing with male counterparts in social and business situations. Conversely, many women don’t support attractive women in serious undertakings because they are envious and want to find something wrong with them. Their thinking is something along the lines of, “sure, she’s hot, but she dresses like a skank and she don’t know shit about world oil markets”. For those of us of average appearance and average accomplishment, it is really discouraging to see beautiful people running everything, so, let’s be real; if Margret Thatcher looked like Sophia Loren, do you think she would ever have been the Prime Minister? But perhaps more interestingly, would she ever have aspired to be?

And finally, if you are a woman and have been discovered at some video beaver stroking, you are pretty much toast form a credibility perspective, despite the fact that you are just the kind of woman that men adore and most women would really envy your liberation and freedom of self-expression and might even want to do the same type of thing if they weren’t afraid of exactly the kind of embarrassment Carrie Prejean is experiencing right now. Throw in a boob-job and you are automatically assumed to be a promiscuous mental light-weight, which is still, in 2009, perhaps the most crushing indictment of a woman’s character possible. Just for the record, I do not believe gender-based rules of sexual conduct any longer have merit from a survival perspective and are, therefore, a useless vestige of more primitive times, but the world is not completely up to speed with me on that one.

So here I am; one the one hand, I truly believe that people like Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean are inane aggregations of whiny vanity, self-serving denial, ignorance, hypocrisy, and irrationality; pretty much everything wrong with humanity, but I have to question whether I have dismissed them without adequate reflection because of genetic and cultural predispositions that have nothing to do with rationality and objectivity. A suicidally depressed Virginia Woolf wrote that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. The meaning of these words can be expanded to all pursuits; women generally have to be in a situation where their ability to seek personal or professional fulfillment doesn’t depend on the prerequisite of being taken seriously; women often have to prove the competence that in men is mostly taken for granted. This, no doubt, sucks; so, I probably should read Sarah Palin’s book, if only as an act of atonement, but since she didn’t actually write it, I’ll give myself a pass, but I will watch Carrie Prejean’s home videos when they make the Internet; I’m only human, after all.

2012

Ok, let’s go ahead and address this important issue; the world is definitely going to end in 2012. I know it is true because NASA denies it. NASA denies that there is a face on Mars and NASA denies that people we don’t know and would otherwise never have heard of, people desperate for attention with poor dental plans, have been abducted by alien creatures and have had their anuses violated by technically complex gadgetry. How would NASA know what had been in anybody’s anus? Spooky, right? I do not know what NASA says about Elvis. NASA is a part of the government and anything the government tells us is wrong. They lie to us, alternately, to enslave us or to protect us from our own irrational fears. Perhaps they lie to us to protect us from our own irrational fear of being enslaved. The point is, we can never rely on anything we are told by anyone who is more educated than we are, who wears a suit or who has any interest in ensuring domestic tranquility or promoting the general welfare. If we are not ever vigilant, they will take our goats.

Speaking of goats, the Mayan civilization of Central America was pretty sharp for a bunch of half-naked guys with no television. They had the only known written language in Mesoamerica and were skilled at astronomy, mathematics and architecture. Their monumental structures still stand despite centuries of neglect and their cities were built with a complexity and scale that rivaled anything in the world at the height of Mayan power in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries. They were a culturally and economically diverse society with a complex and expansive trade system and sophisticated agricultural practices which supported massive urban populations. They also had booze, cigarettes, pornography and human sacrifice. Apparently they didn’t sacrifice the right humans, though, since, for suspected reasons of prolonged drought, ecological mismanagement and political turmoil, Mayan civilization collapsed within the span of a few decades in the Ninth Century. Their urban centers were abandoned and the populace returned to a life of agricultural subsistence in the countryside. It should be noted that many renowned Republican scholars, such as Sarah Palin, are still trying to figure out how President Obama pulled it off.

The Mayans had a complex system of calendars that was based upon concepts previously developed by the Zapotec and Olmec civilizations which divided history into a series of nested cycles which could be aggregated into larger cycles to expand the calendar into the past or the future. The Mayan Long Count calendar regulates the largest of these cycles, and the 13th cycle of the Long Count runs from September 18, 1618 until December 20, 2012, which is why that’s the date the world will end. Given that the Mayans had all gone back to living in the jungles before the 13th cycle began, I’m not sure why there even is a 13th cycle in their calendar, and perhaps the world actually ended on September 17, 1618 and we just haven’t noticed it yet. The Mayans believed the world began on September 6, 3114 B.C., which would be big news to the Egyptians, Sumerians, the men of Troy and the rest of the other approximately 30 million Homo Sapiens who were around before that, but I guess you might have a hard time knowing the world had just started unless the tags were still on everything. Nonetheless, it is still pretty sad that the fact that some Mayan calendar bureaucrat never got around to chiseling down the 14th cycle somewhere has doomed us all to oblivion, but that’s how it works.

So anyway, in 2012 the planets will line up on one side of the sun and the resulting gravitational pull will rip the Earth apart, although it has rather conspicuously failed to do so the numerous times in the past that such planetary alignments have occurred, and those liars at NASA tell us that there will not be an alignment in 2012 and that another such alignment will not occur until 2040. Maybe that means the truth is that the rouge planet that NASA has been hiding from us all these years will collide with the Earth and destroy us all. Clearly all the amateur astronomers and telescope manufacturers in world are in on the cover-up and have been hiding this massive celestial object from the public for centuries. Or maybe the cause of our destruction is going to be that plague or war or health-care reform or whatever else it is that we are being lied to about now; it is so tragically disappointing to know that nobody in the whole world can be trusted except me, a demented Congresswoman and some random dude with a website.

The Mayans, like many societies before and since, worshipped a pantheon of gods who controlled things like whether your child was deformed or not and when it rained and who died from drinking too much, and they made sacrifices to incur the favor of these gods. They also worshipped the spirits of their ancestors which they believed inhabited the world around them and they subscribed to the concepts of demons and goblins and numerology and astrology and all manner of divination. Much like modern-day Republicans, they were a superstitious and fearful lot, and their faith was rewarded by the privilege of standing hot and hungry at the fringe of the expanding jungle and looking wistfully backwards toward the towering monuments of their ruined civilization. 2012 baby.

The Mark of Cain is the Barbeque Stain

I recently viewed a video clip from the American Human Society which revealed some rather distressing behavior at a Vermont slaughterhouse (please see http://radicalsahm.blogspot.com/2009/11/unacceptable.html). Whether you feel that killing animals for food is morally repugnant or you patronize McDonald’s daily, it is really difficult to excuse the sort of indifferent and callous behavior that was captured on camera, and the sad thing is that these events are probably not all that infrequent in the world of animal slaughter. Let’s face it, if you spend the whole day killing animals for a living, you probably aren’t a PETA member. For my part though, when it comes to the morality of meat, I am awash in a sea of gray.

Fundamentally, humans are meat eaters; there is little point in denying it. More accurately, we are omnivores and our teeth and jaws and digestive tracts are designed to deal with most anything we can fit in our mouths, but it is clear that meat has always been a big part of that. The paleontological record is replete with examples of our carnivorous excess, including stampeding whole herds of Mammoths off cliffs in order to have an easy feast. The fact that there was a time when some of the stuff we were eating would also occasionally eat us may give some an ironic sense of moral symmetry, but let there be no doubt that the human race will eat anything necessary in order to survive, up to and including each other. One can argue that a meatless diet is possible, or even superior from the health and ecological perspectives, but such an approach is clearly not the norm in any human culture.

So, they way I see it, there are two distinct questions that are raised by the sort of treatment seen in this video; is it, in and of itself, immoral to kill and eat other animals; and, if we are not prepared to make that leap, then what standard of treatment should be afforded to an animal which is being killed for human consumption? Regarding the first question, if meat is indeed murder, then the whole human enterprise is deeply flawed. Every aboriginal culture that lived in harmony with its environment and revered the primal and the natural would have to be just as morally bankrupt as modern civilization sometimes is. I suppose there is a line of reasoning that ethically distinguishes necessity from preference, but that type of situational analysis generally just leads to the sort of moral parsing that lets us excuse everybody except the people we don’t like. Who gets to define what is necessary? Nature only judges efficiency, not necessity, and the survival value of omnivorousness is so deeply ingrained in human culture that you might as well ask a bee not to dance. If eating meat is wrong, then we are, at our roots, wrong, because that is what Mother Nature, or God the Father, has, in part, designed us to do

I will fully here confess that there is no chance that I will ever willingly substitute tofu burger for that USDA Choice on my grill. Maybe I should, but I won’t, and I suspect that there are at least a couple of billion other Homo Sapiens who feel pretty much the same way. My intransigence does not, however, excuse anyone inflicting unnecessary suffering on our fellow creatures, but now, just so you know, I do realize that this is where my trail of tortured logic breaks down. Telling the slaughterhouse guy that he better not mistreat the cow that he is about to kill, said cow being destined to ultimately be consumed by me for it’s tasty, protein-rich flesh, does seem like some pretty convoluted moral masturbation designed to obscure the cruel reality that I am a principal part of a brutal system of unfeeling exploitation. And so I am. And so are most of the rest of us, and so have we been for hundreds of thousands of years, and our genetic progenitors for millions of years before that. In the relationship between predator and prey, sympathy is extinction and extinction precludes both evil and redemption. Having said that, whatever it means, it doesn’t imply we shouldn’t still follow the Golden Rule. I mean, if someone was going to kill you and eat you, you would want them to keep it a secret and be all nice to you and bash your brains out when you weren’t looking so that your death would be relatively stress-free, wouldn’t you? Certainly we can give a cow such a small courtesy.

So, I am prepared to accept my share of the responsibility for the sad-eyed calf which may, or may not, completely appreciate the full depth of the horror of its situation, and I will give some earnest thought to what I can do to prevent this useless suffering in the future. I will also ask others to understand that every time you flip the light switch that you bear some small responsibility for Chernobyl, that every time you cash your paycheck you have just bought another handful of bullets to be sent somewhere in the world, that for every gallon of ethanol in the gasoline you buy you have just pushed the price of corn out of reach of some hungry family, that for every piece of jewelry you buy someone on some other continent may become a virtual slave and that for every Tom Cruise movie you watch you have just made it possible for one more dumbass to be hornswoggled by a free personality test. I will ask others to please hate the sin but not the sinner, because we exist in such an interconnected web of relationships that we no longer have Pilate’s luxury of simply washing our hands, of saying “I don’ eat meat, or I don’t buy diamonds or I don’t pay taxes, so it’s not my fault”. I will ask others to let sadness, not anger, guide their judgments and to let reason, not outrage, inform their actions. Maybe then we can relieve the suffering of the helpless without just transferring it somewhere else.

Dog Gone

A friend of mine recently had to terminate one of her dogs due to advanced age and the sudden worsening of a long-standing illness. For many years she had been spending a substantial amount of money on medication each month and had been administering said medication on a regular schedule, including a dose ‘round about midnight. I am not sure that I love my own genetic progeny that much, but, needless to say, she was broken-hearted over the death, even though she still has two other dogs to fill the void by shedding hair everywhere, rummaging through the garbage and barking at inappropriate times.

I have great empathy for her loss, having put down a dog or two in my 50 or so years, and it is never pleasant. A couple of years ago our 16 year-old Rat Terrier suffered a “major neurological event’ which left her unable to stand, eat, or drink. She was, however, still able to crap herself, which was perhaps the saddest part of it. When I transported her to the vet for assessment, I was informed she could probably be kept alive for a few weeks with intravenous rehydration and a nutritional mush fed through a tube, but that the prognosis was not good. When I inquired as to the cost of this inhumane procedure I was quoted a figure resembling the Gross Domestic Product of Bolivia. Needless to say, she died shortly thereafter.

I am sometimes still irrationally troubled by my unwillingness to spend my children’s college fund to keep our beloved pet alive for just a few more days in conditions you wouldn’t wish on Michelle Bachman, but I know I did the right thing. Kali (that was her name, pronounced Kah-lee) was a sort of grumpy clown who didn’t like children, other dogs, cats, squirrels, cold days or wet grass. She was, however, very fond of canned Alpo, watermelon, back-scratching and sleeping, and she was a faithful companion and watchdog who would growl menacingly at the Cable guy and Jehovah’s Witnesses. She only bit the kids when they really pushed her limits and she only violated her house training in the final months as she slipped into canine senility. She would not have much enjoyed the tube thing and not being able to pee on top of our other dog’s pee in the backyard would have been a deal-breaker. After the administration of $100.00 worth of sedatives, she quietly crossed over to oblivion without so much as a look of reproach and I cried for the first time in many, many years.

If you aren’t a dog lover, it is probably difficult to relate, but there is a long history of bonding between humans and canines which has evolved from a symbiotic tolerance to a full blown love affair over the course of 15,000 years, give or take. Dogs are social animals, much like us, and they know the value of reliable backup. Unlike many humans, however, almost all dogs know that to have a friend, you have to be a friend. Dogs are opportunistic survivors, like humans, and they never met an easy meal they didn’t like, even if there are cooked carrots in it. With a brain generally the size of a walnut, about half of which is devoted to operating their nose, they are limited to some pretty basic intellectual accomplishments and they probably don’t really feel all those complex emotions that we project on them, but they definitely have individual personalities and they know what they like.

Most dog owners would probably be disappointed to know that all that face licking love their new puppy gives them is just a genetically programmed effort to get them to barf up some tasty chunks. In undomesticated canines, the mothers will hunt and eat prey and return to the burrow where the pups’ face licking will stimulate regurgitation of the partially digested meat, a sumptuous meal for hungry tail-waggers. Almost all other canine behaviors that we perceive as emotional responses are programmed forms of communication which convey information on status in the pack, receptiveness to contact, indifference or anxiety. We become so attached to our canine friends that we grieve their loss just like we would a child, or at least a close cousin, while in the dogs’ simple mind the practical requirements of survival predominate and abstract concepts like love have little place. If you don’t think so, try not feeding your dogs for a week and see if your desiccated corpse isn’t discovered days later.

But that doesn’t mean that our dogs are not telling us something with all their gratifying attention, and I would like to think that the reality is superior to the fantasy. I believe that unconditional love is just a selfish genetic indulgence evolved to keep us from killing our ingrateful children, while respect is an appreciation borne of reason and logic. The dog rushes to the door and furiously wags its tail not to say “I love you” or “I missed you”, but to say “you rock; you can open a can” and “ you are a success; you can make that water thing work” and “you are the hardcore shizzle; you killed all my fleas”. Dogs are results oriented, like nature itself, while sentimentality is a luxury that only creatures with the power to control their environment can afford. Dogs are smart enough to run an emotional con on us and practical enough to know that it really is better to serve in heaven than to rule in hell, and that’s why they were here long before us, and why they will likely be here long after we are gone.

Fore!

I am going to play golf tomorrow. I recently had a birthday and this is how I am going to celebrate, since I am unable to rent a limousine full of booze and hookers and go to Disney World, principally because my wife won’t give me any money. My wife doesn’t like Disney World. Anyway, golf is a reasonable substitute for me since my golf game is generally rated NC-17 for pervasive vulgar and abusive language, crude humor, sci-fi violence, intense peril, frequent urination and disturbing images. PETA has filed for an injunction in Federal Court against me playing golf, but the matter remains unresolved. My contention is that those animals were engaging in an inherently dangerous activity by sitting there in the woods minding their own business. If you’ve never seen a spotted curlew struck by a golf ball traveling 176 miles per hour, you don’t really understand how tenuous our grasp on life is.

Golf is great relaxation for me. I work in local government, so I am constantly being berated by various elements of the community for both my successes and failures, real or imagined. The tax-paying citizens believe their contributions merit a combination of Jesus Christ and Einstein, while all they get is a cross between Mr. Bean and Darth Vader. You can imagine how stressful that is. In addition, I have two teenage sons, which is perhaps self-explanatory, and a wife who has been unemployed for almost a year now. While I love them all dearly (most of the time), my unregulated resting blood pressure in the domestic environment tends to be about 463 over 186, unless there is a broken appliance at home, in which case it is usually out of the range measurable by the sphygmomanometer. Golf provides me the opportunity to be at peace with an indifferent universe and accept my intellectual and physical shortcomings without harsh self-judgment, and drink beer.

To further illustrate the metaphysical benefits of golf, picture this; a golf ball is 1.68 inches in diameter. An average golf course is about 6500 yards in total length from tee to pin. This makes the average hole approximately 361 yards in length. This distance is 7738 times the diameter of the ball. The hole is approximately 4.25 inches in width. This would be like whacking the Earth with an enormous club and sending it 61 million miles through space (two-thirds the distance to the Sun, just inside the orbit of Mercury) and passing it through a hoop only 20,000 miles wide. Perhaps God will ultimately choose to do this to relieve his stress level, but it involves such a complicated calculus of force and motion that Newton would most certainly have turned to haberdashery.

I am actually the proud owner of a book entitled “The Physics of Golf” by Theodore P. Jorgensen. This lengthy tome is a must for any golf enthusiast who is also autistic and suffering from OCD. I ordered the book from Amazon, sight unseen, thinking it might improve my game to have some understanding of the physical forces at work in golf, but the only revelation was no damn wonder I can’t hit the ball worth a crap. In Mr. Jorgensen’s defense, he probably didn’t anticipate that anyone with so little grasp of advanced mathematics would waste the $19.95, and he has undoubtedly done a great service to legions of Ph.D. candidates in Physics who will be able to reference his work in their dissertations. I still proudly display it on my bookshelf with the idea that the more gullible members of society will actually think I was able to read it. I did take golf lessons for a while, but when the primary feedback you get from the coaching pro is “interesting”, “oh shit” and “are you retarded?”, you pretty quickly lose your enthusiasm for the eighty dollar an hour payments. It seems that my mind and body are not on sufficiently good terms with each other to properly coordinate the sequence of complex motions necessary to strike the ball appropriately, and my predilection for brute force over finesse appears to somehow exacerbate this failure.

There was a time in human history when the ability of individuals to hurl projectiles in an accurate manner over distances or speedily navigate obstacles would often mean the difference between eating lunch and being lunch. We developed games to reinforce these necessary survival skills and have handed them down in evolved forms from generation to generation. Golf, however, is not one of them, unless decapitating paralyzed moles was at some point necessary to human survival. Golf exists purely for me to visualize the hard, round heads of my enemies and detractors and to strike brutally without regard for the direction of the splatter, which suits me just fine.

The Age of Anger

As the Great Communicator would say “here I go again”. Most everyone knows I am no fan of religious and political ideologues and I am highly skeptical of much of our national political leadership and their cynical, manipulative and self-interested approach to policy making. On the other hand, being completely fair and balanced, I know it is far too easy to criticize and that one really must travel a while in someone else’s shoes to know the complexity and contradictions that govern our individual circumstances and judgments, so we may sometimes imagine betrayal and failure because of our own ignorance, or arrogance, and not as the result of rational and objective assessment. On the other, other hand, some things are as obvious as an infected eye, and I’m not the only one in America, apparently, who feels that way.

Anyone who has ever taken an inferential statistics class probably still has a headache and blurred vision from it, unless you actually understood what the hell was going on, in which case it is likely you are a soulless cyborg bent on the destruction of humanity; nonetheless, statistical analysis of opinion polling data, while suspiciously beyond the comprehension of the average American, may actually yield some insight into fundamental truths about, well, opinions. Right now, the truth is that many Americans are pretty dissatisfied with the performance of their government and the general state of the nation. RealClear Politics is a website (RealClearPolitics.com) which, among other things, compiles polling data from a wide variety of sources from all points on the political compass with the stated purpose of allowing the reader to sort it all out for themselves. A brief perusal of the data on the site reveals we don’t much like the people we voted into public office.

For the most recent polling period analyzed, the average approval rating for the President is 51.9 percent, with 43.6 percent disapproving of the job he is doing. The other 5.5 percent presumably didn’t understand the question or didn’t give a rat’s ass. A 52 percent approval rating may be enough to win an election, but it probably won’t get you a Noble Prize; however, under present circumstances, 52 percent approval might be viewed as outstanding, especially since 56.1 percent of Americans simultaneously think the country is on the wrong track. Apparently 22.3 percent of those holding that opinion don’t hold the President responsible for any of it (do the math).

Congress, conversely, appears to be only slightly more popular than vaginal itch with an average 25 percent approval rating, and an outstanding 66 percent of Americans surveyed disapprove of the job Congress is doing. But still, one in four adult Americans think Congress is actually doing a good job, which is not so bizarre when you consider that (according CBS News Polls) 48 percent of Americans believe in ghosts and (according to Reuters News polling) 35 percent believe in Bigfoot. A CNN poll tells us that 64 percent of adult Americans believe humans have been contacted by alien beings and 50 percent think aliens have abducted people (unfortunately none from Congress), so maybe a 66 percent disapproval rating isn’t as impressive as it sounds. While the Democratically controlled Congress gets the stamp of approval from only one in four, only one in five identify themselves as Republican (Pollster.com), so I guess that a lot of people who actually voted for the useless dung-buckets in Congress are no longer satisfied with their own judgment just eight months down the line.

Which brings me to where I was meandering to begin with; we Americans are just a tad bit conflicted when it comes to governance of the last, best hope of humankind. We started this experiment in democracy with a deep mistrust of authority and the attitude that we classless outcasts could do better than a bunch of wig-wearing, out-of-touch fancy-pants five time zones away. In that respect, we were probably correct, but our first swipe at national management was too tepid and sucked worse than King George’s haughty bureaucracy. We finally hit upon this wonderfully balanced compromise that allowed for both efficacious government and individual liberty, and which in my mind still ranks as one of the all time great products of human wisdom.

Unfortunately, this compromise is based upon a few problematic preconditions, foremost among them being the notion that the individual citizen will actively participate in the process of self-governance, up to and including actually making some personal effort to educate one’s self with respect to significant public policy issues. It then logically follows that we will select our representatives based upon the extent to which we believe they are properly informed and disposed with respect to such issues. I know I’m repeating what I’ve written here previously, but it is repetition for emphasis; if the Congress sucks and the President is ineffective and the economy blows and the environment is collapsing, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

We have everything backwards if we are looking to L'Enfant’s swamp in northern Virginia. for answers. We currently have access to more information from more sources about any and everything in the world than ever before and we are more educated as a nation than we have ever been. We have more leisure time to devote to self-improvement, if we choose, than any generation in history, but we spend most of our time looking at Internet porn, getting facelifts, Facebooking, tweeting, twittering and twatting while we leave the management of our hard won empire of justice and reason to professional narcissists and sociopathic ideologues. And then we whine about how unfair it all is.

In case you haven’t noticed, humans can be a real rational and moral contradiction. Whether you ascribe this to original sin or evolutionary randomness, our imperfection is a pervasive fact of our existence and blaming stuff on the devil or soulless corporations or the Trilateral Commission or the Media just constitutes further moral and intellectual failure when, in fact, all of these things are really just us. Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying "The qualifications for self-government in society are not innate. They are the result of habit and long training." In other words, if you want the benefits of liberty for yourself and your posterity, then get off your ass and be the “self” in self-governance. We probably do need to storm City Hall in an angry mob, but instead of torches and pitchforks, we need to bring bricks and mortar and trowels and maybe a book or two, because we can’t do shit until we liberate ourselves from the shackles of self-indulgence and the tyranny of ignorance.

You Lookin' At Me?

And now, the blobfish. The blobfish has become something of an Internet sensation due to its oddly human visage (see below) and its generally indolent lifestyle, but very little is really known about its daily activities or its genetic lineage. Being a creature of the deep, it seldom graces us with its presence and when it does it is so wholly out of its natural circumstances that it surely doesn’t make its best impression; sort of like a Texan at a Mensa meeting.

The blobfish (Psychrolutes marcidus) is a resident of the Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of southern Australia and Tasmania. That part of the world is generally a pretty weird neighborhood, including bird-eating sharks, coconut eating crabs and meat eating caterpillars, but the blobfish is not so much known for what it eats as for how it eats. The blobfish, as its name might imply, is sort of the Homer Simpson of the marine world and feeds by floating around with its mouth open, hoping something tasty will blunder in. This is very similar to my feeding habits during football season wherein I position myself strategically upon the couch and pirate pizza, chicken wings and egg rolls as they are transported through my territory by unsuspecting family members.

The blobfish’s indolence extends to its method of locomotion which is essentially floating wherever the current may lead. Given its minimal musculature, the blobfish is generally unable to get up much steam, like most of Newt Gingrich’s ideas. The good news for the blobfish, which, after all, didn’t ask for this life, is that most of its body is composed of a low density goo which is both unappetizing and slightly less dense than sea water, allowing the blobfish to mostly avoid predation as well as preventing it from becoming mired in the layer of fish dung and beer cans which coats the undersea landscape off the Australian coast.

The reproductive life of the blobfish is poorly understood by marine biologists, who are puzzled that anything so homely could get any action, but anyone who has ever been really drunk at 3:00 in the morning will probably regrettably testify that aesthetics are not always the primary issue in mating behavior. In any event, the female blobfish squirt out their embryonic progeny upon rocks on the ocean floor and the eggs are then fertilized by their amorous suitors in an indifferent blobish sort of way. For you ladies who find something familiar in this description, please visit Match.com. The females (who else) then hang around guarding the developing eggs in an equally idle fashion until the small fry hatch and float indifferently away.

So this is the story, to the extent we are able to discern; the blobfish is birthed by an inattentive mother and then floats away with its mouth open and continues to do this for mostly the rest of its life, breaking this routine only intermittently when the urge to for some reason restart this boring cycle strikes it. One might suspect that it is likely there is much more to the blobfish than I have reported, but you wouldn’t know it by searching the web. The blobfish does, however, reside generally about half a mile down, so it doesn’t get much press. Most of the blobfish that are observed are inadvertently hauled up in fishermen’s nets, no doubt a rude surprise to both parties.

But let us not snicker too arrogantly at our ugly vertebrate cousin; for he is as much a supreme achievement of nature as are we. Perfectly suited for the inhospitable conditions of enormous pressure and scarce sustenance, he expends virtually no effort, but boasts a evolutionary success record far more ancient than our own. There is no empirical data which give any indication that he lies, murders or uses credit irresponsibly. He lives in balance and harmony with his environment and sustains successive generations without diminishing the wealth or diversity of life on Earth. For all his repellent splendor, he is completely incapable of the depth or scale of ugliness that humans casually take for granted.

Down the Rabbit Hole

They’re getting ready to crank up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) again next month following more than a year of repairs after the 4.5 billion dollar science experiment popped a cork less than a month after beginning operation in September of last year (for more on the topic see http://toomuchfuzzylogic.blogspot.com/2009/04/boson-buddies.html). Scientists from around the world are waiting anxiously 570 feet below the Swiss countryside for the resumption of atom smashing so that they can resolve their petty academic disputes over things like the origin and fate of the Universe and the fundamental composition of everything in our world.

There has been a great deal of less-than-scientific hysteria over the potentially disastrous consequences of ramming protons into each other at nearly the speed of light, with dire predictions of world-swallowing black holes and Star Trek like rips in the fabric of space-time which would presumably let something unpleasant in or something important out, but all reputable physicists (who get paid to discover stuff that can destroy the world) agree that the probability of widespread destruction is relatively small. There is still litigation pending in various jurisdictions throughout the world over the alleged safety concerns of the LHC, but anyone waiting for the planet’s various legal systems to save the Earth from destruction has probably never actually been in a courtroom.

Most of you (both of you?) reading this know that I am a big fan of science and a firm believer that humanity’s destiny does not involve sitting here in ignorance waiting for the Universe to find some creative way to obliterate us. Our fate, whatever it may be, rests in our understanding of the basis of reality and the ability to protect ourselves against the randomness of life, whether it be amoebas or asteroids. There are others who very reasonably point out that we are ourselves rather unreliable and that the power of advanced knowledge may be misused to our detriment. They point to things like atom bombs, nerve gas and Facebook as examples of how technology run amuck can destroy civilization, or even lead to our extinction.

These are certainly valid fears and our track record as a species does make one wonder if experiments like the LHC are really advisable, but for those worried about letting the Genie out of the bottle, I would argue that the Genie escaped the moment humanity attained sentience and any idea that we can be anything but curious to the point of recklessness simply denies our history and the substance of what we are. Scientific inquiry is inevitable, but fortunately literally the smartest people in the world are down in that tunnel near Geneva and they know that they can’t be praised by our progeny for centuries to come if they allow the Earth to be sucked into a closed, time-like curve, never to be seen again.

Of course, it has never been the scientists that we have had to worry about; it has been the politicians, corporations, deranged fanatics and ignorant masses that have taken scientific discovery and done really stupid things with it. Knowledge is like a stick; you can use it as a tool, burn it for warmth or whack a fellow human in the head with it, but it has no practical or moral context until we chose to employ it. Humanity will not be destroyed by scientific inquiry, but only by the ubiquitous threat of human failure. To paraphrase a great American, we have nothing to fear but us ourselves.